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This year, the world saw a long-theorized weapon in action: a commercial drone, like a person might find at Best Buy, dropping a bomb on a target in Iraq. These drone bombers, used by the ultra-violent quasi-state ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the flashiest combination of modern technologies with the modern battlefield. Cheap, camera-carrying robots, put to nefarious ends by a group that could never otherwise dream of fielding an air force. Dropping grenades isn't the deadliest thing an insurgent group can do with a small flying robot, but it leads to a very important question: What, exactly, is the answer to such a drone?
[...] Here is just a short sample of the more out-there anti-drone tools: net guns, drones carrying nets, squads of drones with nets, drones with net guns, and a smart anti-drone bazooka that fires, you guessed it, a net at a drone (we liked that last one). There was a vaporware drone concept that ensnared the propellers of other drones with wire. A Russian firm floated the concept of a microwave gun, to fry the electronics of hostile drones. And most famously, there are the Dutch police eagles, trained to snag a drone from the sky.
Part of the problem for law enforcement, the Pentagon, and other entities trying to protect against drones is that they're cheap. Workable quadcopters cost as little as a couple hundred dollars. Is there a way to knock drones out of the sky that's just as cheap as the drone itself?
Source
http://www.popsci.com/how-to-stop-a-drone
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday February 13 2017, @02:45PM
You and I are thinking of it as a technical problem to solve, while those who are actually working on this for money are viewing the problem as 'how to get paid lots of tax money' so simple and inexpensive is not what they are going for.
"Hitting is great but hard but if you use a shotgun they don't need to take the full blast to fall out of the sky."
Yep. Some experimentation would be good to determine range and best loads but I'm thinking number 8 birdshot might be ideal for a quadcopter or similar target. You only need to damage 1 critical component, there are several, and they're not armored.
Some of the stuff being cooked up in Syria may be slightly more challenging, but from what I've read not much, they're working with stuff on the same scale and of course armor on any sort of airplane is a big problem since weight is so important.
"A shortened shotgun (or sawed off -- which technically probably isn't legal) can shot almost whatever scrap you can find and it would devastate an unarmored drone at close range and bringing it down."
A short barreled shotgun cant fire 'whatever scrap you find' at least not without a lot of work processing that scrap into ammunition. You're thinking of a blunderbuss? A modern sawed-off shotgun is going to take normal shotgun shells as ammunition. They just scatter the shot much more quickly. Devastating at extremely short range but nearly useless beyond that. Doubt you would be shooting at drones so close this would be a good idea.
"If you are using a jammer, such as the DroneDefender mentioned in the article, will the drone just crash or will it stop and land in a controlled manner? Which might be just as dangerous then either way."
It would be a neat trick to simply hijack control, and far from impossible (the Iranians pulled it off with a US drone a few years ago,) but a bit tricky. Just jamming it should be much easier and less error prone, but yes there is a problem. With a normal quadcopter, when the control is jammed, they will descend and halt for safety (at least the one I saw do this did, and it's my understanding this is standard practice - for safety.) So that would be nice BUT there's no guarantee these are 'normal' devices with intact safeties. The guys making them can probably program whatever behavior they want to kick in when jammed, so that might be bad.
"Since range is an issue you could also just make some kind of kamikaze-drone that smacks into the other drone. Possibly with a minor explosive device of it's own. Fighting bombs with other little bombs."
That could work but it doesn't seem like the easiest path. Might be a profitable one though, obviously every time one of these things blows up that's a new sale, and the little defensive drone could easily wind up costing 1000 times as much as the threat that it stops.
"If the main problem is that they are to cheap I guess they could just institute a drone-tax which would make the price skyrocket instead. "
I'm sure the jihadis building these things in underground workshops in Syria will just quit work immediately when they realize they can't pay the taxes on them. What?
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